First steps with Google + : a not that social broadcasting tool

September 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : Google + burst into our lives with a lot of noise. This omnipotent killer application is supposed to revolutionize our tools and usage and, incidentally, give its competitors the kiss of death. But what’s really happening ? Behind a sober and exemplary user interface, a tool with an impressive interface even if it’s still in its early days. But there’s still a lot to be done before it becomes adult. The power of circles won’t be enough to hide the lack of a true community side, the absence of an API makes it hard to integrate in an already busy social context. As for guessing whether it can become an enterprise or not…the road is both long and unclear. In the end, Google + as it is today comes one year too late and it needs many lacks to be fixed before being seen as the tool of the future, despite an impressive potential. Google + may be a future rockstar…if its manager makes the right decision.

I’m very late at writing this post but it’s hard to judge a new tool in a couple a day, most of all when it’s a beta that may be quickly improved. Most of all, in the first days we all look to new applications either with lovers eyes or with rejection. So waiting a little to calm down is necessary.

I will start with a warning. Social as it is, any tool depends on each user’s context and needs. In other words, I’ll refer to my own experience and context and I’m not pretending that what is true for me will be true for anyone.

1°) Fluidity, soberness, efficiency

At first sight, Google + makes a very good first impression. We’ll discuss the possible future of the tool in the enterprise in another post but one things is sure : many major vendors should have a look at Google +’ interface. Sober design easy to access and understand functionalities, using Google + is a smoot and pleasant experience. Obviously, they have learnt a lot from Google Wave.

2°) The concept ? Nothing new !

To explain Google plus in a few words, I’d say that it’s halfway between a blog and a microblogging tool, that any entry is shared either publicly or with a group of people (gathered into “circles” or with only one person. Much more powerful that many tools Google plus competes with. But…

A couple of years ago, at the prehistoric age of social software, someone told me about a kind of personal notepad where each entry could be shared with on person, one or several communities. Unity for the author, granularity for the audience. It happened in the last days of 2005…was working well and is still working. It has a name : blueKiwi (many tools have adopted the same logic until then). Sincerely I could not refrain from laughing the first time I tried Google Plus, telling to myself  : “Ah…with all their money and resources, 20% of employees’ time dedicated to innovation…it took them 6 years to reinvent blueKiwi and others…Congrats guys!”.

Ok. What makes the difference is circles.

3°) Circles are not communities and Google + is not social

Generally, social tools allow to address people or groups of people (often called communities). Groups or communities mean that any member is able to speak and start a discussion and not only answer to what someone else has said…which is the case for circles in Google Plus. For example, I can share something with a circle named “enterprise 2.0″ and the people in this circle will be able to answer and join the discussion. But if anyone wants to share something with the same circle, he should put it in the current thread of clone my circle…what is not possible as I write (except manually….good luck).

Considering the “people/user-centric” logic of the tool, that seems more the consequence of the logic than a lack or a mistake. But I’m not sure it will cover all the usages people are used to.

So, Google + looks more like tool designed for mass or targeted broadcasting than a social tool in the usual meaning of the word, with a community dimension. Receivers are quite passive and should stay in the place and role the senders decide.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Enterprise 2.0 in 2011 : value or denial of reality ?

December 14, 2010 By 7 Comments

Summary : what will happen in the Enterprise 2.0 world in 2011. Making predictions is very difficult because many things will depend on what enterprise 2.0 wants to become. After 5 years of experimentations, thoughts, discussions, there’s enough maturity on methodologies, limits, improvements to be made that we should say the big change is on its way. But the road is long from words to actions and many things will depend on enterprise 2.0′s ability to get out of kind of denial of enterprise. Accept to frankly talk about value, put hands into complex and sensitive mechanisms that drives production and execution, forget the idealistic and angelic vision of a dreamt organization driven by passion, openness and nice intentions wlll be key in 2011. What’s at stake : moving forward or losing credibility.

Before trying to guess what the enterprise 2.0 world will look like in 2011, let’s start summing up what has happened since 2006 and what the situation looks like today.

In 2006 Andrew McAfee came to the conclusion that the use of social software could support new ways of working. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s what he called “tech-enabled organization”. These new ways of working being made desirable and even necessary by the evolution of the economy and value creation models, lots of people tried to implement the above mentioned tools. Often without success. Then came the conclusion that (for those who did not get it before…) tools were nothing but enablers (the “tech-enabled” thing in McAfee’s writings is too often overlooked) and that organization, management, people and even culture were parts of the equation.

With time and after lots of experimentations and reflection, it became obvious that the structure of work and organization had to be tackled (read my 2009 and 2010 predictions) to make the change possible and be sure it would improve value creation. What led to a consensus on the need to tackle business processes both for alignment and value creation matters. It was quite a logic conclusion for anyone knowing the deep mechanisms that drives operations and value creations but was light-years away from the dominant doctrine that was nearly exclusively focused on building communities above (and out of) the flow of work. The idea was not to favor the one or the other but to articulate both to meet organization needs and create synergies between unstructured cross-organization exchange dynamics and structured and vertical operation ones.

Meanwhile, tools improved a lot in terms of richness, integration capabilities etc.

Let’s sum-up :

• awareness that we have to tackle the organization mechanisms and machinery

• awareness that we have to articule on the flow and above the flow dynamics.

• awareness that we have to go beyond community dynamics

• existence of a lot of valuable knowledge and sets of practices about community management. Let’s be honest ; we have “best practices”, heaps of methodology, lots of cases and the tools to support the whole (Cf: the incredible work of the Community Roundtable). More and more people are now able to build and manage successful communities and what gives the opposite feeling is that too many businesses try to turn into communities what is not communities (hence the need to do beyond…)

• we have good social software tools.

So everything is alright and enterprise 2.0 won’t experience any issue in 2011. Things are going well, we’re on a straight highway and success is ahead. Problem : it seems we take pleasure driving with he hand brake on.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

And the best enterprise social network platform on the market is…

November 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : at a given moment in any enterprise 2.0 project, a choice has to be made about the tools that will be used. And,, the “specialist” is often asked the same question : “Tell me what’s the best tool on the market”. That’s a tough question regarding to the number of parameters to take into account and, in fact, there’s no “best tool on the market” but rather “tools that fit the most a given context. However, with hindsight and as organization’s maturity is increasing, the criterias that are used to define such a tool are evolving. For a perenial, scalable and coherent project that will avoid the “social bubble syndrome, I came to the conclusion that businesses should  qualify an environment and application services rather than an application as such.

I can’t remember how many times I was asked what social platform to chose, what was the “best one” in my opinion. That’s a question I’ve never been able to answer.

First, because it’s impossible to suggest a tool regardless to its purpose. Do you want a tool to screw or hammer ? Both a hammer and a screwdriver are excellent tools to do DIY but if the objective is not known there’s a real risk of suggesting to buy a hammer while there’s a screw issue.

Then, because many factors hav to be taken into account. Its functional richness, its ergonomy (very subjective), how easy it is to implement it quickly, the need or aversion for Saas, its ability to integrate with existing tools, its coherence with the prevailing technologies in the organization…not mentionning a lot of factors that may sound surprising but may be essential in a given context. Depending on the need, each of these points will weight differently what will lead the organization to make a choice that will be theirs.

Last, because it will always be a matter of compromise rather than a matter of choice. Anyone who have ever tried to conduct an exhaustive researche on social tools or, like me, has to know and work with a lot of platforms will tell you the same thing : there’s no perfect tool on the market and even if some are marking themselves out, a given need will make us chose a tool that we would never have considered as a possible first choice before. Even worse : by dint of trying more and more platforms, we are often disappointed with the one that’s chosen, whatever its name is. Everyting being a matter of compromise, we chose the one that is 70%, 80%, 90% like the “ideal tool” as we could dream it but does not exist. And we spend our time saying “xxx software does it better”…knowing that if we have chosen xxx software we would have regreted something from yyyy soft that was the other option.

What’s wrong with compromises is that, by chosing something that averagely meets all the needs, you can end with something that specifically meet no need at all and see all business departments launch pirate projects and go to find an alternative platform for their own needs.

So my answer used to be “try to fing the tools that fits your needs the best and avoid tools that are so neutral that despite they won’t raise any issue they won’t solve anything either”. And once done “learn to love what you have since you can’t have what you love”. Far from being satisfying.

I don’t even mention the cases when businesses have to chose two tools because any couldn’t do the job alone.

Now I’ve refined my criterias. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Employees are not middleware

October 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : the reason why employees balk at using many of the tools they’re provided with is because they are asked to articulate different ways of working and type of informations together and bridge the gaps between application silos. Not only all of them don’t have the required skills to do that, to understand how and why they should articulate things together but, moreover, they don’t have the time to bridge between tool. For a long time they’ve been asked to do a kind of middleware job. In the future, organizations won’t avoid the cost of a deeper tool integration in order to replace people’s time that’s not scalable by a technological layer that is. That’s also true for enterprise social software.

The less we can say is that organizations have been investing a lot to make employees more productive by making their tasks easier to perform but employees really balk at using the tools that are supposed to make their life easier. At the beginning many thought that it will be different with enterprise social software because it’s made of tool that people use and appreciate in their personal lives. But, at the end, the conclusion is still the same : an incredible portfolio that can help to face nearly all situations…but very few adoption.

Let’s try to think as the average employee. In front of him, on his screen : an email client, a portal, a document management system, one or two activity specific application (ERP, CRM…), a social network, an instant messaging client… Enough to do everything and solve all his needs and channels for every kind of interaction : structured, unstructured, synchronous, asynchronous, within a defined project group, within open topic-centric communities…

The truth is that organization made a bet. They bet people intuitively know how to articulate these logics and tools and behave as information smugglers.

- articulate logics : work with structured activity centric tools and go to find relevant information to make decisions in a social network for instance.

- articulate tools : use a CRM, then find some information in the social network, then in the ECM, come back to the CRM then use the portal… Aggregate all the informations about someone from the official directory, his activities on the social network, his contribution to wikis etc…to be sure this is the right person to contact to solve a business problem.

- being information smugglers : a discussion in a tool may help to generate an information in another, an information here may be the cause of a conversation there.. To make the system work, information has to move from one tool to another. A report from the CRM to share in a group space, a discussion inside a community to link to an action in the CRM… In the best case people copy and past, in the worse they make screen shots…and end doing nothing because it makes them waste too much time. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Software is business by nature, information social by purpose

August 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment

At the first times of the coming of 2.0 tools in the workplace, they used to be conscientiously locked into secured experimental bubbles in order to tame them in a safe context. This kind of approach showed its limits and its counter-productive nature.

- the tools in questions were isolated from traditional applications (directories, workflows, business tools) they didn’t communicate and exchange with. Yet the proper of these tools was to improve discussions and information sharing. None of these are spontaneous and most of times they are caused by a situation, a context, a stimulation. What makes a situation, a context “happen” in the workplace ? Elements coming from business tools. Consequence : discussion was kept away from what caused it, problem solving from what constitutes the problem. Result : no participation.

- consequence of the previous point : the utilization of these tools was not integrated in user’s work flow. Since a tool is not linked to business systems, the usages and interactions it supports is not linked to business either. Moreover, it was a key lessons from many experimentations : the tool didn’t have to impact people’s day to day job, bring any change or confusion.What a paradoxical situation for many users : since discussions, sharing, exchange are parts of knowledge workers work flow, everything was done to make social software be used for anything but that.

So, integration and unification of both work and information flows are indissociable.

Slowly, reasion is taking the upper hand and the importance of integrating social software in the existing application landscape and in employee’s work flow is now understood by most people. A better integration of social applications with business applications is needed and that’s good.

But isn’t there something that sounds strange ? That means that, first, the value proposal and the positionning of these tools was not clear for all players and, second, that no lesson was learnt of many years of trial and errors : building bridges means than there is no understanding that we’re talking about one sole things.

Saying that social and business have to be more integrated shows that the first is not seen as being a part of the second yet. It means that they are still thought separately.

So it seems surprising :

- that many players in these field consider they are social before being business and are too focused on their own beliefs to understand business needs and constraints. Social is a means that is there to serve the business and not an end business has to give a reason to exist.

- that many companies still think that “social” is complementary since it’s a part of the very nature of business, most of all at times when communication, in all its forms, is key to execute many process. But, to some extent, it’s less serious than the previous point that, once fixed, will stop confusing the way businesses understand these things.

A product is “business” or is not. There’s no room for “almots” or “yes but”. Any information is not social or business. It’s business or not and has to be able to be the subject of “social” actions. Moreover we can wonder if the strongest barrier to social software adoption is the fact we tried to socialize people inside new tools instead of making it possible for them to “socialize” information wherever it is without having to launch any new tool that adds the impressive list of already existing one and forces them to split their attention to take one more information source into account while what stimulates information production inside the tool is always outside the tool and can be found anywhere, in any other business application.

sParadoxically, Social software will be a major and adopted trend the day when there will always be business applications in the workplace and social will be a transparent layer nobody will even notice. Articulting social with business, building bridges may be a a good first step but in order to create value for and with users one more step will be needed : fusion.

PS : I purposely use quotes when I say “social” or “socialization”, admitting that I’m using comfortable buzzwords that gives senses without having to say what it exactly means. Maybe explaining, and even debunking, the S word is necesary. Let’s say that, applied to information, it means the ability to share it, push it out of its original container and interact on / around it out of any organized and planned approach. Applied to people it would mean enabling them to identify, connect to and interact with / on people out of any beforehand defined system.

enterprise-social-software, intégration, logiciel d’entreprise, social software, social media

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , ,

My takes on the Enterprise 2.0 Forum : Enterprise 2.0 and the end of social washing

March 23, 2010 By 9 Comments

Capture d’écran 2010-01-23 à 00.12.50I’d like to take a few minutes to share with you my takes about the last  Enterprise 2.0 Forum that took place in Paris on march 17th et 18 th. First, a few words about the context.

I was looking for a professional event about enterprise 2.0 in Paris. Why do I mean by “professional” ? I’m fed up with the usual 40 min “show flat” presentations which conclusion is “it’s really awesome but I can’t do this in my company” and where we have the vague impression that insteat of getting answers to our problems we’re being sold a little piece of dream that comes with a big piece of software. In brief, attendees leave with shining stars in they eyes but realize, when the time to wake up comes, that it does not help them to achieve anything. I don’t even mention the events where we gather among experts, gurus, convinced practictionners to share certainties and common places before we realize that those we’re supposed to help weren’t in the room.

I came to the last Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt with this idea in mind and, there, two things surprised me in a positive way. First, the format, that favors exchanges instead of one way talks (exchanges with the speaker but also among attendees) and, second, the fact that sponsors, even present around the event and the conference room were not allowed on stage to turn case studies into disguised sales speeches. So I we had the idea to bring this format to Paris, with a modest ambition regarding to the time we had : demonstrate it was possible in a local an french context and provide attendees not with discourses but with a strong added value. I think we did it and can already promise you there will be a second edition next year and than having 12 months instead of 2 to organize it will allow us to make things even better ans maybe bigger.

Last thing before delivering my takes. We usually judge this kind of event regarding to the quality of speeches (and of the buffet if you’re french). That’s not enough in the format we chose because it relies on an active participation from attendees (what implies to keep an “human size” to favor discussions). If I got many positives feedbacks, it’s also mainly because of the audience that asked the right questions and started vibrant discussions. When a conference room is crowed with people that have to het things done in their company, the debate easily reaches a higher level.

After the form, the substance. Here are my conclusions in a few points

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Enterprise 2.0′s weakness ? Decision

December 29, 2009 By 3 Comments

Let’s assume that, through a mix a community management and socio-collaborative management, businesses manage to make information and people for identifiable and accessible in order to facilitate and accelerate workaday execution, solve problems and invent tomorow’s products and operating models. Even if that sounds seducing, there’s something wrong in the reasonning.

All these dynamics and informations don’t create any value by themselves. That’s one of the reasons why, even if the value of such things is admitted by nearly everybody, there’s still something in decision-maker’s heads that prevent them from seing the tangible value behind.

All these things, this informal, organizational, human capital etc.. create nothing but a potential. A hudge potential though, but only a potential. This brings us back to what I wrote about strategy maps. All this things does not bring anything if not reused in structured and formalized operations. There are some ways to do so :

• Social routine that brings information reuse on the flow.

• Decision : that makes possible that something new is used or started.

I’d like to focus on this last point. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Recommended Bookmarks Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Are you “on demand” or “when we can” ? Enterprise 2.0 and the customer perspective

November 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

What does social software bring ? Nothing by itself (contrary to many others, a social app doesn’t process or treat anything but allow people to do things…) but since it makes some things more easy to do it should, in principle, help to improve performance and productivity for many kind of tasks provided people understand they have to slightly change the way they work (what does not means changing work fundamentals but only adjust a few things).

Most often, operations managers can’t see the concrete benefits. To do so they would need to take hindsight but they don’t have time and are too involved to. Consequence : top executives often have the vision while people who have their hands in everyday operations still wonder what problem this new things actually solve, why they’d need to socialize their work, share part of the information. Everyone know what a solution that solves no problem (or no problem people are aware of) is worth.

An approach that sometimes work is to ask managers to imagine themselves at the client’s place. Note that a client could either be an external client or an internal client. Their staff’s job is to meet the client’s need and their role, as managers, is to make sure they will, in the assigned time limit, without being directly in touch with the client. Furthermore, in many cases, managers have to get in thouch with clients only when things go wrong. It’s all the more easy to imagine oneself at the client’s place since everyone know how being a client is, either from internal or external providers. Sometimes, realizing that you do exactly what you don’t like your providers to do is a big step to progress.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Recommended Bookmarks Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts